The Motivation Manifesto Page 2

  Let us awaken now and realize there is greater vibrancy, joy, and freedom available to each of us. There is more feeling. There is more power. There is more love and abundance. But gaining access rests on our shoulders, for only two things can change our lives: either something new comes into our lives, or something new comes from within. Let us not hope for mere chance to change our story; let us summon the courage to change it ourselves. Some will stand in our way, but we mustn’t hide or minimize ourselves any longer. Let us believe faithfully that our dreams are worth any struggle and that it is our time to free ourselves and rise to glory.

  WE THEREFORE, as free women and men of courage and conscience, appealing to our Creator for the strength to live our intentions, do, in the name of our Destiny, solemnly publish and declare that our lives are—and, of right, ought to be—free and independent. We declare that we are absolved from allegiance to those who oppress or hurt us, and that all social connections between us and them are and ought to be totally dissolved, and that as free and independent persons, we have the full power to exert our true strength, live our dreams, find peace, create wealth, love openly those who have our hearts, contribute without fear or permission, strive for personal greatness, serve the common good, and do all other acts and things that independent and motivated persons have the right to do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we pledge our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

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  ON FREEDOM

  I want freedom for the full expression of my personality.

  MAHATMA GANDHI

  AVIBRANT, GENUINE, AND PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS THE right of all humankind. But most of us fail to grasp it. We are lions and lionesses living as mice. Rather than exploring free on the savanna, we are living small and distracted lives. It is the calling of each man and woman who draws breath to have a grand vision for our lives, and to, each day, claim the vastness of that vision. Yet rather than stalk our dreams with abandon, we too often sit and sulk, blaming and complaining, chasing after paltry goals that cheat the magnificence of our being. Is this our true nature?

  Surely not. We are all meant to be wild and independent and free, our hearts filled with a ferocious passion for life. The day is meant to be ours, and our purpose within it is to live as who we truly are and enjoy the full terrain of life’s freedom as we chase our own meaning and purpose, our own legacy. If we can unchain ourselves from social restrictions, we can have that day, and we can leap and stretch, expressing our power to its limits. We can hunt our dreams with a fierceness unimagined by those creatures trapped in wastelands of stress and sorrow.

  So let us not forget the thing we are after:

  Humankind’s main motivation is to seek and experience Personal Freedom.

  This is neither a political statement nor necessarily a Western philosophy. It would be difficult to deny that all people worldwide deeply desire the grand freedoms—social freedom, emotional freedom, creative freedom, financial freedom, time freedom, and spiritual freedom. No matter a person’s religion or spiritual or life philosophy, they want the freedom to exercise it. This argument carries on: no matter how someone wants to feel in life, they want the freedom to feel it; no matter what one wants to create and contribute, they want freedom to do so; no matter what someone dreams of doing with their work time or free time, they want the freedom to direct it and enjoy it; no matter one’s political perspective, they want the freedom to follow it and support it. And so at the base of all of our desires is the greater desire for freedom to choose and actualize that desire.

  Choosing our own aims and seeking to bring them

  to fruition creates a sense of vitality and motivation in life.

  The only things that derail our efforts are fear and oppression.

  That is ultimately what Personal Freedom is: liberty from the restrictions of social oppression and the tragic self-oppression that is fear. Freed from these things, we have the ability to express who we truly are and pursue what we deeply desire without restrictions set by others or ourselves.

  When experiencing Personal Freedom, we have a heightened sense of genuineness and joy in our being. We feel unbounded, independent, and self-reliant. There is a palpable authenticity and aliveness in how we relate to others and contribute to the world.

  Personal Freedom—our goal—means:

  living freely by crafting a life on our own terms;

  being free in the moment from oppressions, of past hurts and present anxieties;

  being lighthearted and spontaneous as free spirits;

  courageously speaking our thoughts, feelings, and ambitions with those around us, without concern about acceptance;

  enjoying our free will to pursue abundant happiness, wealth, health, achievement, and contribution;

  freely loving whom we choose with passionate abandon;

  standing freely on our own, professing and protecting our ideas and integrity;

  serving a mission that we have chosen;

  fighting to give our children a foundation in such freedom, building in their hearts the will to live as they choose so that they may meet oppression with courage, and opportunity with a virtuous intent to contribute.

  Can anyone deny that these are things all humans desire and strive for?

  The call for individual freedom as the great human drive has been expressed for centuries by revolutionists, humanitarians, philosophers, and spiritual leaders. We have heard its essence voiced as the inalienable right of humankind to think for ourselves, to speak our minds, pursue happiness, seek peace and prosperity, and sing to our own conception of the Divine without the conformity imposed by small minds or our own small-mindedness.

  Outside of tyrants oppressing their people through fear, this common argument is made across most modern cultures, political movements, and areas of human study: each of us, every individual, ought to have the right to happily and peacefully move our lives forward without fear or hurt or imprisonment or arbitrary social constraints.

  We inherently know that, when controlled by others, life loses its flair and we are cast into melancholy and mediocrity. Without such striving for individual freedom, what becomes of us? We relinquish our free will to a society of strangers that speaks not of liberty and courage but of conformity and caution. Our true self is subjugated and a pseudo self emerges, a mere reflection of a society that has lost its way. “They” start running our lives and soon we are not “us” anymore, just walking zombies filled with the commands of others’ preferences and expectations. We become those masked souls who spend their time wandering in a wildernesses of sameness and sadness. We become tired and weak. We lose our nature. And then we see the worst of human behavior—a mass of people who do not speak up for themselves or others but rather do only what they are told.

  From this reality the worst of human horrors emerged in our past: the mass murders of races and classes because the powerful elite or the churches said to scorch the earth or cleanse the souls, the Holocaust cast upon millions as the world looked on for too long before acting, the mass indifference of a society that allows its people to starve and struggle, the despicable acts of mobs and madmen who simply do not respect the freedom or rights of the individual human. When freedom is gone, suffering sets in for all.

  Why does freedom pull so tightly at our hearts?

  It is because freedom is tightly bound to the human desire for ascension—our natural drive to rise from our circumstances and actualize our goals, our potential, our highest self.

  All things that make life worthwhile to great men and women—the pursuit of happiness, challenge, progress, creative expression, contribution, hard-won wisdom, and enlightenment—derive from our wanting to ascend to higher levels of being and giving.

  Every human has a natural inclination to ascend to higher planes of existence, but it rests upon each of us to match that inclination with real initiative. We must remember that freedom can be achieved only by
diligent will and volition. Seeking to ascend in life takes grit and resolve, struggle and courage. But to those who make the effort belong all the glories of life and history. Consider that the great masters and leaders of yesterday trained themselves to be free from social and self-oppressions to an impressive degree. They struggled but learned to be free in the moment to express who they truly were and to create and contribute to the world without paralyzing fear. They didn’t feel the need to conform but rather learned to be independent, unique, and genuine, even as they successfully served the world, even as they were often judged or jailed. On the ground of such personal liberation stand the world’s most noble figures: Gandhi and Frankl and King and Mandela were free even as they were imprisoned.

  Just look back at history, and freedom leaps from the page as iconic metaphors:

  It’s the brave revolutionist, who we saw as the lonely figure on the scaffold, refusing to recant his beliefs and quit the fight for independence.

  It’s every great revolt we celebrate, when we saw the outnumbered take the field against bigger, better-armed forces, ready to be massacred so that their children may stand a fighting chance at seeing freedom another day.

  It’s the forming of new nations, where we saw bombs bursting in air and the homes of the brave being built on the foundation of liberty.

  It’s the race for new lands, where we saw wild horses thundering westward, carrying even wilder men racing to stake their claim for a new life.

  It’s the soul of the Civil War, where we saw neighbors divided into blue and gray, killing one another, bloodying the earth of their homeland, and yet rising eventually as one to abolish the idea that their fellow humans should ever be enslaved.

  It’s the breaking of earthly bonds, where we saw two brothers on a homemade flyer slip the surly bonds of gravity.

  It’s the drive behind the First World War, where we saw mud- and bloodstained faces thousands of miles from home, dressed in olive drab, armed with nothing but knives and rifles and canteens and senses of duty, honor, and country.

  It’s the fight against Hitler, where we saw that tiny, evil tyrant—monstrously enraged, inflicting horror and death on millions—finally destroyed by a band of nations, one led by a free man in a wheelchair.

  It’s the greatest dream ever voiced, where we saw thousands march in fearful, bigoted towns against a wave of pick handles and dogs and fire hoses; where we saw hundreds of thousands march to that shining city on a hill, to listen to one man’s dream to let freedom ring.

  It’s that giant leap of mankind, where we saw that small metal capsule carry brave men in white, puffy suits beyond the blue sky into the blackness, transcending their own earthly limits, landing on the moon, coming home to a world that could never again believe in the impossible.

  It’s the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, where we saw millions hungering for freedom tearing down the real and metaphorical wall dividing humanity. Decades and thousands of miles away, in another country whose great wall still stands, we saw a little man in a large public square stand defiantly in front of an oncoming tank, proclaiming his right to freedom.

  These are the enduring images of our history, colored by the blood, tears, toil, and sweat of those who sought and fought for some form of liberation. Over and over, we see millions march, millions fight, millions die, and millions thrive, all in the cause of freedom.

  The ultimate narrative of the human species

  is its quest for more freedom

  and the related struggles to ascend

  to higher standards of living and relating.

  In such divine desires to overcome tyranny, oppression, and the limits of our own darkness and small-mindedness, we find recurrent hope for humanity.

  Those who found hope and lived a free and happy life despite history’s brutalities and darkness were not simply people of fortune or luck or fame, but rather of conscience and courage. They knew the demands of their time, that their destiny was unfolding with the man or woman to their left and to their right, and that they would need to remain motivated in overcoming both their internal demons and the social tyrants of the world. Theirs was a long march of effort and endurance and enlightenment. They declared without apologies their independence, their rights and direction. Their only guide was an internal one, a manifesto in their minds that called for the courage to be themselves and the discipline to direct their energies toward higher purposes.

  Because of their example, we have many social freedoms to be thankful for. Worldwide, political freedom continues to grow or be desired. Financial freedoms are beginning to extend to more corners of the globe. Individuality and uniqueness is winning in commerce. All the freedoms we take for granted in the more liberated and abundant cultures—convenience on every corner, safety from physical threat, wide access to education and health care—arrived on the backs of men and women dedicated to some form of freedom.

  For this, we owe previous generations—and, in respect, future generations—no less than to seek and find our own modern Personal Freedom. For this, we must awake each day in utter clarity that these are deeply momentous hours in our lives, when we will either shrink from similar greatness, preferring the approval of small minds, or stand on the shoulders of the noble and free people who refused to settle. So let us each in our own way and in our own voice echo their courage and proclaim freedom as our fight, our cause, the very challenge we awaken to experience and achieve.

  THE DOUBTS ABOUT FREEDOM

  Some have questioned if we have too much freedom, if our great liberties are too much of a good thing. The long light of this golden age of peace and prosperity has changed the world for the better, but for some, it has led to a sunburn on the soul—an excessive exposure to abundance that has led to indolence, greed, narcissism, and entitlement.

  But such people, even as they might live in the more politically liberated patches of Earth, are not in truth free. They are caged by their own recurring vices. The man afflicted by hunger for power or money for its own sake is just that: afflicted. He is tormented by incessant desires for more without cause. He is the most likely to wear a social mask to succeed, and thus he is always unsure of himself and his life, the deep tear inside always causing him to obsess about how to get more, why he doesn’t have it already, and whom he will have to please or become in order to get it. The woman afflicted by the need for adoration cannot have a free moment of real joy away from her obsession with self; she is slave to the never-ending quest for youth and beauty and social acceptance. Her endless desire blinds her from areas for growth and alienates others, ripping away her chances at genuine self-expression and the soaring kind of true love she deserves. And for the entitled, there can be only a constant whining misery; no person who believes they should be given everything for nothing will ever be free from an immature envy and contempt for those who have more than they do. The entitled are perhaps the most caged of all, slave to a grand fiction that the world owes them anything at all.

  So we find that even in abundant and politically “free” cultures there is still the tyranny of conformity coupled with inner turmoil.

  This brings us back once again to the focus on Personal Freedom. The cause does not disappear simply because there is political or financial freedom.

  There will always be some form of social pressure, and we will always need to free ourselves from the vanities of the modern world so as not to become the lazy, greedy, and narcissistic caricatures of modern mankind. We will always need to work toward self-mastery and social prowess so that we can authentically express who we are and joyously seek what we desire of life. Let that be our work.

  A CAUSE INTERRUPTED

  It is only in active self-expression and pursuit of our own aims that we can become free.

  Thinking, feeling, speaking, and behaving in ways that are truly our own brings integrity and shapes the foundation for our happiness. How could we ever lose sight of this?

  Seeking Personal Freedom begins when we a
re young and starting to form our own beliefs and directing our behaviors independent from the command of our caregivers. It is the child who takes her first steps away from her mother, who crosses the street safely by herself, who chooses with zeal what she wants to eat, wear, draw, or dress like. Hers is the story of our natural inclination to be independent, a desire to become our own persons. As we age, the impulse becomes more distinct, powerful, and intellectual—we consciously decide that we want to stand on our own, find our own way, chase our own dreams, break down our own boundaries, love without permission and contribute without restriction. We decide to go away to school, break off an affair, take a risk, start a new career, join a movement, see the world. We start asserting our ideas because we want to make our own mark. This natural impulse never goes away.

  The issue is that our seeking is tragically interrupted in our lives again and again, stolen away by those around us or our own fearful thinking.

  And that is the reality that we now face.

  We must overcome social- and self-oppression if we are ever to join the ranks of the free souls who love their lives and lead their people.

  SOCIAL OPPRESSIONS

  Our most difficult task is to defeat social oppression, the caging of our spirit and the stifling of our potential by others. We mean the moments when someone exercises judgment, authority, or power against us in a burdensome, cruel, manipulative, or unjust manner. It’s when a parent controls us so much that we can’t be ourselves; when a lover threatens to withhold love if we don’t do what they say; when a boss lies and then threatens us against telling the truth; when we want to follow our own spiritual beliefs but the culture suffocates us with its dogma. It’s when any other person’s petty judgments, harsh criticisms, demeaning comments, injuries, or unreasonable expectations and direct or indirect actions hold us back. When others make us feel insignificant, powerless, or unworthy, this is an effect of oppression. All the artificial barriers erected by a controlling society are part of this—the absurd informal rules or formal bureaucracies that limit people according to background, class, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, age, or appearance.